Ansible Interview

Jeff Wilson · 28 Jan 2009, 05:57 · from 2009-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:57:49 -0600
Subject: (urth) Ansible Interview
In-Reply-To: <39ed084f0901271230o7dee419ct780eaaa0b6e590ee at mail.gmail.com>
References: <60016944C0A74B77B9BDFC5E98C39B25@GATEWAY>	<497CFDE6.2090104 at doubtfulpalace.com>	<D9DA56007C5846C9A0A33DA17DB4B3B0@GATEWAY>	<39ed084f0901252206n4b735e9ax284ba02febad5be2 at mail.gmail.com>	<497D9B92.5010708 at io.com>	<39ed084f0901260741k52c49b8csc93ef26cfed2dce9 at mail.gmail.com>	<273409710901270919g5b0e3156rb0990890a5723af7 at mail.gmail.com>	<173801176.20090127204427 at poczta.fm>
	<39ed084f0901271230o7dee419ct780eaaa0b6e590ee at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <497FF3DD.6000704 at io.com>

Matthew Groves wrote:
> I'm having trouble seeing how the excerpts quoted indicate that the
> shade is a spiral, and trouble envisioning how a spiral shade would
> ever provide night anywhere in the Whorl, since there would always be
> sunlight coming from the east or west.
> 
> The last excerpt, for example ("...the first thin thread of the long
> sun cutting the skylands in two") seems to me to indicate that the
> shade moves from north to south over the width of the long sun, not
> east to west along its length.  Same with "the sun has already begun
> to narrow."  And when Silk is looking at the skylands and seeing
> valleys, it's late at night, and they're "as clear and bright as
> Silk...had ever seen them."  So it's full light, i.e. noon, in the
> skylands.  The light is coming straight down on the skylands, not
> obliquely from the east or west.  Yet Silk sees valleys filled with
> shadow.

It's possible that the Silk is opposite from the middle of a long day 
section, so it is high noon as well as in the middle of the day 
overhead, but that the valleys are in the dawn or dusk far to the east 
or west, suggesting that the Whorl is several "days" long.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

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